Nice melody and good thrive. I like the stanzas but as you said they could be more specific. It is so easy to get vague on these matters. Go för it Thomas, who dares wins.

It is a lovely composition. The instrumentation is really strong. As others have probably said, you could use alternatives to 'some' and this would give more sense of specific people or places. I like the imagery of the lyrics and the idea of a cinder bed.

Firstly great music and instrumntation. There's a note choice in the intro that was truely unexpected but absolutely right. It's very evocative of a Scandi Noir theme tune where you get a sense of the mood but not the story and plot. I admit that I didn't really understand the character - who sleeps in cinder bed - the devil? someone who died in the fire? The image of place I got was cold and wooded, Finland? Washington state? Wherever the Brothers Grimm gathered their tales?

I like the imagery, the first and last stanzas are very descriptive. The arrangement and performances are all great, too. I'm not seeing any problems with the lyric but then I've been there trying to get it right and not quite making it. Sounds great to me.

This has an ominous feel to me. The music, the vocal delivery and lyrics all seem to move me in that direction. That harmonica starts it off and the contemplative plucked melody support that thesis. Not sure if that’s what you were going for. The lyrics are a bit ambiguous to me. I think that works well though, just an observation not a critical judgement. It’s quite enjoyable to listen to, which I gladly did a few times. I like it…

First off, the music is a really rich, atmospheric and enveloping and it lifts the lyric very effectively. For my two penneth, I think the lyrics stand well (very well) as they are - the opening and closing verses convey a character who is somehow apart from the world, viewing the desolation in a detached way - someone who is detached from the physical world entirely - a ghost, a god or something stranger. I wonder, if you do still want to bring out more character and sense of place, the character needs to be moving through the world that you're painting and needs to make choices that show who they are - maybe we could see the impact of those choices? Bit of a long winded response, but the song is worth it.

That line Sleeping on a cinder bed is so compelling. I found myself thinking about whether the cinders were still hot or closer to ash already. I hiked up and down the Cinder Cone in Lassen Volcanic National Park once and it felt like I’d step forward and slide back further. The song carried this latent sense of life being a move from flame towards ash, where it’s impossible not to consume things and people along the way. The music is so compelling.

If you feel like the lyrics need to be tighter, one thing to try could be to lean into that sense of the progression of time. Stuff like “old smoke curls around my head” “Long past virtue, not yet dead” “Could I have lived without the blood I’ve shed?” In the next stanza you could experiment with pronouns to play with making it more immediate. “I will die and you may burn” Maybe with the devil verse, you lean into the devil’s bargain. “He gives us each more than we can need. Won’t make us burn until we cease to bleed”

maybe you just need an opening verse that tells us who and here he is and what he is doing. as it stands, we figure this out as we move through the song, but if you want to give us a stronger sense, the place to do it is the outset.

Nice clean harmonica to kick things away. That old European folksy feel again, which I happen to really like! Good lyric and a very pretty melody.